140Char

There is one feature I dearly wish Twitter would implement as soon as possible. Although I understand they need a business model, and my day job will hopefully be made slightly easier with their proposed marketing/business tools, there is one thing which is becoming ever more vital to me as a user.

Let me search and organise my Direct Messages easily, please. Tweetdeck does.

(I’m trying to check through some of the other popular clients, such as Seesmic Desktop)

For me, Twitter is easily my most used social network – I do use the messaging functionality in Facebook and Linkedin, for example, but Twitter is the stream of contacts and information that I follow and interact with constantly.

And as my network has grown, and Twitter has increase in popularity, an ever-increasing amount of business and personal messages are flowing in and out of my accounts.

It’s starting to replace email as my primary form of conversation with many people.

And yet I have over 200+ Direct Messages, and more coming in every day. And despite my best efforts to sort and file the information, there’s so much getting lost in a list that I can’t order, filter or search.

And although I’m a fan of Tweetdeck, there are times when I can’t install Adobe Air, or I need to use the web interface for other reasons.

Cheers.

A User.

I suspect many people will be silently thanking Andrew Parker for Twittersnooze.

It’s a simple way to unfollow someone for a defined temporary period between 1 and 30 days. Perfect, for example, if a colleague is off to a swanky foreign conference, and you’re stuck back in the office. Or if you just need a break.

There’s only one flaw, which is due to the Twitter API – you’re effectively automatically unfollowing, and refollowing again, which means the target of your snoozing will get an email when you resume following them. But aside from the potential issues around explaining why you’ve snoozed the same person three times in one week, it’s a really simple and effective solution to friend fatigue…